I.       The President and other “conservatives” are advocating arming teachers to make schools safer. We could talk about whether this is a good idea, but I am struck by how this indicates a shift in “conservative” thinking about teachers. The President maintains that we can expect teachers to be heroes because they “love” the children. Public school teachers over the last generation, however, have been repeatedly denounced by “conservatives” and others. Think Scott Walker in Wisconsin less than a decade ago. A large component of his attacks on public unions was really an attack on public school teachers. The teachers get paid too much and have cushy jobs. They are concerned about an easy job, not educating their students. And so on. The image that has been fostered is that teachers are leeches, almost the equivalent of cheating welfare recipients, and the teachers are incompetent to boot. Apparently “conservatives” now think that even though teachers can’t teach, they can shoot. (Take a guess what Florida teachers get paid. According to the Florida Department of Education, the average annual salary for a Florida certified teacher is $45,723. This is not the starting salary. That average teacher has over twelve years of experience.)

II.     Much has been said about the “warning signs” missed by the FBI and local law enforcement concerning the Parkland, Florida, shooter. But as the spouse said to me, if they had properly paid attention to this information, what could they have done? Nikolas Cruz legally owned the murder weapon and his other guns. The police could not have taken them away, and if they had tried, surely the NRA would have screamed about the violation of Second Amendment rights. What could law enforcement have done before the shootings?

In considering the “warning signs” about Cruz, there is a hindsight bias. We know that Cruz in fact slaughtered many people, and that makes the missed warning signs seem especially egregious. But we need to evaluate “warning signs” before the violence, not after. Are there signs that are good predicters of future gun violence? How often are the signs accurate? How often do they produce false positives? What are the responses that lessen the possibility of the future violence? How often are such warning signs reported to law enforcement or other agencies? What resources does it take to respond? Where do the resources come from? What responses will politicians legally authorize? How can we answer these questions without gun-related research . . . that has been banned by the Dickey Amendment, but more on that later.

III.      When we talk about victims of gun violence, let’s always include the police officers who have been gunned down.

IV.       A discussion of gun violence should recognize that there is a constitutional right “to keep and bear arms.” Those who wish to control guns better to lessen gun violence need to acknowledge that they recognize the Second Amendment and that they are only seeking to make it more likely guns will be used safely.

V.       We have only limited knowledge of the extent of the Second Amendment right. We might say that also about other constitutional provisions. Every year the Supreme Court renders decisions about the First Amendment rights of free speech and the free exercise of religion or the Sixth Amendment right of counsel, so our understanding of these provisions continues to evolve. However, these rights have been interpreted frequently by the Supreme Court and even more by the lower courts for upwards of a hundred years. We may continue to learn about the contours of free speech, but we do know a lot about that First Amendment right. In contrast, the Second Amendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court only a handful of times, and we know much less about its content than we do about other constitutional rights. We do know, however, that while the Supreme Court has not interpreted the Second Amendment often, the Court has indicated the Constitution allows for reasonable regulation of firearms. Just as liberals should recognize that there is a constitutional right to keep and bear arms, NRA-types need to recognize that the Supreme Court has allowed for the reasonable regulation of those arms. Both sides need to better understand the Constitution. (Continued on March 7.)

So, the New Amsterdam wall was constructed. Did it work? Did it make the village safer? Did it keep out the undesired? On one level, the answer is “yes.” No New Englanders or English ever attacked the settlement from the north. On the other hand, the New Englanders and English never tried to invade this way. Perhaps that means that The Wall was an effective deterrent, but that is doubtful. Even if enemies wanted to conquer the settlement from the north, the thought of slogging through forests and over rivers was more likely a deterrent than some planks stuck in the ground.

The Wall was certainly unlikely to be a successful defense by itself. It would only have been useful along with a strong military presence. The Wall surely could have been scaled. Fighting folks would have been necessary to repel the climbers. Furthermore, you would think that a cannonball would have gone through the wooden planks easily and that fire might have brought it down entirely. The Wall might have slowed an attack, but by itself seems unlikely to have stopped a determined force. The goal must have been to give the inhabitants time to gather their own forces to repulse an attempted incursion, not for The Wall to provide an impregnable barrier.

There were flaws in this reasoning, however. First, The Wall, as with infrastructure today, needed to be kept in good repair for it to function well, and that did not happen. Those stories about the thrifty Dutchman come into play here. Apparently, many New Amsterdam residents when they needed a shelter for Petrus the pig or Harriet the hen wondered for a moment where they would get the wood for the structure and then—aha—remembered the planks a short walk away. The Wall was also an inviting source of firewood. Planks soon were missing from The Wall. A careful eye might have noticed that whenever there was a new gap in the wall, there was freshly sawn wood in someone’s yard.

The defense strategists, however, had a bigger problem. While the English and New Englanders never breached The Wall, unfriendly Indians did enter New Amsterdam. After The Wall was built, Stuyvesant left the village taking troops to confront Swedes in Delaware. At the same time, Indians of various tribes came down the Hudson heading to Long Island for a confrontation with traditional enemies. As they crossed Manhattan outside New Amsterdam, an Indian woman was killed by a Dutchman for stealing a peach from his orchard. The Indians then stormed into the village, ransacking houses. The Wall did not prevent this. The Indians did not even have to climb or breach The Wall; they simply went around it. The Wall may have gone from river to river, but even if it extended into the rivers, it was apparently not hard to wade or swim or canoe around it. (Remember the effectiveness of the Maginot line?) In what became known as the Peach War, fifty whites and fifteen or so Indians were killed. Peace was obtained not through better border protection but with a treaty.

This Indian incursion highlighted the fact that even if The Wall had successfully sealed off the northern border, it did not change a fundamental fact of New Amsterdam’s geography. The island–surprise, surprise–was mostly surrounded by water. Why attack from the land when there were so many landing spots for boats and men?

Eventually, New Amsterdam was threatened by the English, but not from the north. Instead, the English in 1664 menacingly anchored four warships with a couple thousand men off Brooklyn at the entrance to the harbor. A quarter of those men proceeded to a ferry landing across from Manhattan. Stuyvesant wanted to fight, but not many other residents of New Amsterdam, if any, stood with him. The settlers may have thought they would have been destined to lose any battle, but it also seems that having settled in New Amsterdam, they had no great tie to the Netherlands and no great enmity towards the English. Their true bond was to their life in New Amsterdam. The English promised that they could continue with their lives as long as they swore allegiance to the English king. This was an easy choice for these commercial men. Soon, without a shot having been fired, the men of New Amsterdam, including Peter Stuyvesant, had signed that English oath. (Stuyvesant was recalled to the Netherlands for a how-could-you-let-that-happen? conversation. He blamed the West Indies Company for not having better armed the colony. Even though it was now controlled by the English, Stuyvesant returned to New York and his house and farm where he died in 1672.)

On September 8, 1664, New Amsterdam was formally ceded to the English and the settlement became New York. What remained of The Wall, which stood in the way of progress and expansion, was torn down by the English in 1699.

The Wall was a waste of time, effort, and money. It served no useful purpose other than to give the illusion of a defense to what was not a real danger.

Perhaps some other time we can talk about the Berlin wall.

The construction of The Wall across the northern border of New Amsterdam teaches some additional lessons. Planks were needed, and this meant money was needed, and wealthy people stepped forward, as they always do—not to selflessly aid their homeland, but to make more money. The well-to-do loaned money for the building of The Wall at ten percent interest. What do we think will happen if we build a wall today on our southern border. Many contracting and supply companies will be involved, and no doubt most will make money—which will come from our tax dollars. (If we hold our breath waiting for Mexico to pay for it, even the red staters will have turned blue.) Construction, however, can be a risky business, and some of the construction companies may have financial difficulties and perhaps will not make money. On the other hand, I am confident that the financiers of the wall will profit. One of the certainties of our history is that financiers will always make money out of wars and defense spending (and today pay a lesser tax rate than they would had they toiled physically toiled for their gains.)

But I digress. Some of the money went for the planks, and many, if not all, were purchased from Thomas Baxter, an Englishman. It might seem strange that he was selling the material for a barrier against his fellow countrymen. Perhaps the reason was simply the frequent one of profit above all else. But Baxter had left England, and this might indicate that he felt few ties to his birth place. And while New Amsterdam was Dutch, it was not a hostile place to others.

New Amsterdam was a commercial establishment. The Company wanted to increase the population of Manhattan to increase trade and agriculture and thereby to grow profits. All things considered, Holland was a nice place to live. Not enough Dutch wanted to move to the new world, and consequently the West Indies Company did not shun non-Dutch immigration. Thus, many of the New Amsterdam residents came from places other than Holland. In 1643, one correspondent said that he counted eighteen languages being spoken in the settlement. Twenty years later records indicate that perhaps from a third to a half of the possibly 2,000 inhabitants were non-Dutch.

Peter Stuyvesant, however, had one exception to this open-border policy. Stuyvesant was a devout member of the Dutch Reformed Church, which was the established church in New Amsterdam. (At least in my experience, it was the Dutch Reformed Church, or at least that was what it was called by my high school friends who were members of it. With our never ending adolescent humor, we called them dike jumpers. We also checked their thumbs to see if they could plug a hole in a dike to keep back the flood. Their church was stricter than those attended by the rest of us. On Sunday afternoons, we often played pickup baseball or football games, but Dutch Reformed kids were not allowed such frivolity on the Christian sabbath. That did not stop them from playing with us, but we had to move our games to some out-of-the way location where their parents were unlikely to drive by and spot them. Many years later, I ran into one of these childhood friends who had become a minister. When I referred to the denomination as Dutch Reformed, he corrected me and said now it was simply The Reformed Church.) While accepting of the non-Dutch generally, Stuyvesant was, to put it mildly, not overly fond of Jews, and when some moved into his town, he sought to expel them. His bosses did not take kindly to that and ordered Stuyvesant to allow the few Jews to remain. A healthy economy, they realized, required immigrants. Only the Dutch Reformed Church was permitted to have public services, but Jews, Puritans, Lutherans, Catholics, and Quakers were permitted to worship in the privacy of their homes. Jews were even allowed to have land for a burial ground about a mile north of The Wall, and that plot is the oldest European cemetery on Manhattan. (Many of us owe a debt to the New Amsterdam Reformed Church. The Puritans did not celebrate Christmas; it was just another work day. Many of the Dutch in America saw Christmas time as both solemn and joyous. The joyous part included “Sinter Klaus” who gave presents on St. Nicholas Day, December 6.)

This acceptance of immigrants may have meant that many of the non-Dutch came to see New Amsterdam as home and felt little allegiance to the countries of their origins. Certainly, Thomas Baxter, the Englishman who sold the planks to build The Wall to keep out the English, did not seem to have had much loyalty to the English. After his plank salesmanship, he became a pirate and preyed on English ships. But that does not mean that he had developed an attachment to the Netherlands. He also went after Dutch ships. It appears that his allegiance was simply to money.

New Amsterdam may have paid for The Wall, but it did not pay for the labor, or at least not for all the labor. The West Indies Company was involved in many commercial enterprises, and one of its most lucrative businesses was the African slave trade. New Amsterdam probably had slaves from its beginning, and by 1635 a person was appointed to be an official overseer for the Company’s slaves. By the 1660s, New Amsterdam had about three hundred slaves and perhaps seventy-five free blacks, accounting for about twenty percent of the village’s population.

Peter Stuyvesant “contributed” slave labor to The Wall. This may not have been the entire workforce, but if not, we do not know who the other laborers were or what they got paid or what the relations were between the paid and coerced workers.

(To be continued.)

William Kieft, once director-general of New Amsterdam, may no longer be remembered in New York, but reminders of his successor can be found in many places. Peter Stuyvesant’s name has been given to a high school, a street, a square, a housing complex, and city neighborhoods. A statue of him has been erected, and his remains are buried in a New York City church graveyard. But even if Stuyvesant had never made it to New Amsterdam, he would have had a memorable career.

Son of a minister in the Netherlands, he joined the West Indies Company and was sent to Dutch possessions off the cost of Brazil. After a half dozen years there, he was transferred to Curaçao, and shortly after he turned thirty, he became acting governor of that island, Aruba, and Bonaire. A few years later, he led an attack on St. Martin, an island the Spanish had captured from the Dutch. Hit by a cannonball, Stuyvesant had his right leg amputated below the knee. He returned to the Netherlands where he was fitted with a wooden leg, leading to his nickname–no surprise here–Peg Leg Pete. When he regained his strength, he was sent to New Amsterdam to replace William Kieft.

For several years he went about improving the ragged condition of New Amsterdam, and in 1653 he built The Wall. Although there are no records enunciating the reasons why it was built, fear of Indians could have been a cause. New Amsterdam was situated among tribes that were ancient enemies with each other, and that led to a restiveness that may have concerned the Europeans. And, of course, not long before, under Kieft, the Europeans had massacred Indians.

Other forces from the wider world came into play. England and the Netherlands were commercial rivals, and the mid-seventeenth century saw Anglo-Dutch wars in various parts of the globe. (I don’t remember my education ever covering these wars. Why is that?) The leaders of the sparsely settled New Amsterdam were concerned about being attacked by the English. These concerns were heightened by the Dutch colony’s precarious perch in North America. Although the Dutch claimed what is now Delaware, Swedes had been settling there, and to the northeast, New England seemed to be expanding–and warlike.

The Dutch had overlapping claims to land with the English New Haven colony, and it seemed to the Dutch in America that New Haven was trying to expand into Dutch territory. (New Haven was a Puritan settlement, and as far as my reading goes, the least joyful and the most petty and mean of the Puritan settlements. This says a lot about New Haven. We can be glad that the New Haven colony did not expand. I will concede that later New Haven did produce good, even if over-hyped, pizza. But, of course, New Haven also subsequently gave us Yale.) Furthermore, rumors flew that a former resident of New Amsterdam was raising an army in Rhode Island to attack his one-time settlement.

In response to these multiple threats, in 1653 Stuyvesant had a wall built across the northern border of New Amsterdam. (And again what are the odds? It stretched along the present Wall Street.) Descriptions of the wall differ. One gives a suspiciously exact length of 2,340 feet. In any event, the wall was not long because New Amsterdam was a small place, smaller than today’s Manhattan below Wall Street. From early on, inhabitants threw all sorts of things into the waters that surrounded the island, and this landfill expanded the land mass. The present shoreline is now several blocks further out into the waters than it was in the seventeenth century. Even with this expansion, however, lower Manhattan south of Wall Street is a small place. In my jogging days, I would run around the perimeter of the tip of Manhattan, and even though I was covering more ground than that which existed in New Amsterdam, it took only about ten minutes. My guess is that the entire perimeter of New Amsterdam could have been walked in 1650 in less than a half hour.

Not all agree what The Wall looked like. One historian describes it as a palisade by which he apparently means logs upright in the ground with sharpened points on top—think those forts in the John Ford westerns or, perhaps, F-Troop. (These cinematic structures were often placed on the treeless plains. Where did all those logs come from?) On the other hand, most of the historians I have read state that while a palisade was the original intention, The Wall in fact consisted of vertical planks. One historian, however, said it was a double row of upright planks with Wall Street in between.

(To be continued.)

The heads of the Dutch colony in North America were employees of the West Indies Company. Few of us know the names of the first two, but the third one, Peter Minuit, continues to have fame. He is the one who selected the Manhattan location as the headquarters for the new Dutch enclave, and, of course, many of us have heard that in 1626 he bought the island from the Indians for $24 worth of beads.

Surely it tells a lot about our national character that this story has been passed down through the centuries. What actually happened is now murky to say the least. I have read several accounts. They agree there was a transaction in the 1620s between Indians and Minuit. Was it for $24? Well, since dollars did not exist then, probably not. Instead it is accepted that the Dutch valued the deal at 60 guilders, but, of course, money was not exchanged. Of what use would Dutch currency have been to the Indians? Instead, some sorts of goods went to the Indians. Was it beads? We do not know. Maybe it was a mixture of goods—a pot, sewing needles, clay pipes. Maybe beads. We simply do not know except that I am positive that we can rule out Bic lighters even though they would have been handy. The question then comes up, “They got it for 60 guilders. What would that be worth today?” Again, the historians don’t agree. For example, I have seen a source that says that the guilders would be about $1,000 in modern money, but I have no idea how that equivalency was calculated. I do buy into one valuation method–the beer one. Sixty guilders could buy 2,400 steins of beer in New Amsterdam. I pay $7 or $8 for a beer or ale today in New York, so at this beer rate, the transaction would be worth about $18,000 now.

But there is another set of questions? Did the Indians sell all of Manhattan to the West Indies Company? Some accounts suggest that the transaction only concerned the southern tip of the island, a small plot of ground. Others suggest that the Indians were not selling the land in a European sense because it is not likely the Indians had the same sense of “property” or ownership as the Dutch did. The Indians might have only been leasing the land or merely permitting the Dutch a non-exclusive access to it. Of course, an underlying message of the version that has come down to us is that the Dutch were sharp traders. In another version, however, the Indians were the clever ones. This story contends that the Indians who traded with Minuit had no claim to the land but were Canarsies from distant Long Island. Most versions, however, say that the transaction was with Manhattan-dwelling Lenapes. In any event, the transaction was a success. No Indian tribe bothered that tiny settlement at the tip of Manhattan while Peter Minuit ran the place. The troubles came when a less successful governor was head of the colony.

In 1638, William Kieft came to govern New Amsterdam. He quickly angered many of the inhabitants by closing taverns, but his handling of Indian affairs was even more atrocious. While the Europeans had been living without Indian conflicts, Kieft’s Indian policies soon led to regular bloody skirmishes, and within a few years, Kieft ordered the Company’s militia to massacre 120 Indians leading to Indian retaliations. New Amsterdam now had to think about defending itself in ways it had not before and started fortifying the northern reaches of the settlement. First Lesson. The Europeans under Kieft had taken unnecessary, hostile actions against Indians. The actions had not made New Amsterdam safer but the opposite, and the result was that the Europeans now had to defend themselves from threats of their own making that had not previously existed.

The inhabitants of New Amsterdam were not pleased with Kieft’s governance. The West Indies Company realized that the settlement functioned better and more profitably if there were reasonably good relations between the governor and the inhabitants. They sent Kieft packing.

(A pattern seen in Kieft’s New Amsterdam has continued to this day. Kieft may have imposed restrictions on taverns to bring increased morality and order to the settlement, but morality and order seldom win out in New York. Money does. As many others have after him, Kieft soon sought money more than morality. He built his own distillery and, not surprisingly, then relaxed the tavern restrictions. A quarter of the buildings in New Amsterdam soon housed a tavern of some sorts. This meant that no one had far to go to get a drink. That pattern also continues in New York. My local is two short blocks away, and I pass two bars on the way there, and if I strolled a few more feet, I would find several more drinking establishments. Of course, this means in New York, there is often no need for a designated driver–yet another good thing about this place.)

(To be continued.)

We were promised time and again a wall across our southern border, a wall to be paid for by Mexico. While you may be thinking about that and whether it should be constructed, I have been thinking about America’s first border wall and trying to figure out whether we can learn anything from its history.

We begin with a man who went looking for spices and found beaver. Englishman Henry Hudson, bankrolled by British merchants, had made a couple of failed attempts at finding a sailing route from Europe to the Far East. Hudson could not smooth talk these businessmen into funding yet another voyage, so he jumped across the English Channel and convinced the Dutch East Indies Company to underwrite one more attempt. (I don’t think that the Dutch called it the Dutch East Indies Company. I think to them it was just the East Indies Company.)

The story goes that Hudson was ordered to sail east, north of Russia to see if he could reach China. Apparently, Hudson was not enamored of the charms or likely success of such a route. He had heard rumors of a Northwest Passage through North America, so Hudson disregarded his bosses’ orders and went west. This is why in 1609 he found himself sailing up the Hudson River. (What are the odds that he would go across the Atlantic and then proceed up a river that bore his name?) He found that the Hudson petered out. This was not the Northwest passage, and he was not going to be bringing back cinnamon, cardamom, or nutmeg. But in the land around the northern reaches of the Hudson River, he found beaver, boatloads of beavers. (All these beavers building dams no doubt made this a much more exciting place than the Albany area has ever been since.)

Europeans then were in love with beaver fur. (Ever hear anyone talk about beaver meat? Ever see a beaver recipe? Europeans may have salted cod caught off North America and brought it back, but I never heard of salted beaver.) When Hudson returned to Holland, I do not how he explained his wrong turn that had him going towards the setting sun instead of away from it, but his company overseers took consolation in the beaver sightings and saw a moneymaking opportunity. Hudson also told them about this island with a great natural harbor at the mouth of his river. It was a marvelous place for a trading post for all the beaver skins that could be taken from the luckless animals and shipped to the fur-mad Europeans. The Dutch then laid claim to the land from what is now Delaware north up the Hudson and to what is now western Connecticut and began a settlement in 1625 on the southern tip of Manhattan. It was called New Amsterdam.

(Hudson did not last as long as New Amsterdam. A few years later he was up in those cold waters exploring Hudson Bay—again, what are the odds? He wanted to press on after some significant difficulties. His crew did not. You know those stories about how the Inuit set adrift their aged parents for the parental last voyage. I don’t know if the indigenous people learned from Hudson’s shipmates, or the Europeans learned from the natives, or it was merely coincidence. Having had enough of Henry Hudson, his ship fellows set him adrift near the arctic circle, and–surprise, surprise–he was never heard from again.)

The Dutch thus began a New World settlement. It was a commercial place, and it was run by a commercial enterprise. Not long on imagination on this front, the Dutch named it the West Indies Company. And beaver was the moneymaker, which explains why a beaver is on the seal of the City of New York. (I have never seen a beaver in New York City, not even in a zoo. I have only seen a few beavers anywhere. Perhaps my first sighting was as a boy with the family in a car driving to northern Wisconsin. A beaver was waddling across the road. The father came to an abrupt halt. Beaver do not move quickly on asphalt, and we waited for quite a while. The father looked in the rearview mirror and saw nothing. Assuming that the beaver had finally made it to the ditch next to the car, he inched on. Thump. The left rear wheel clearly drove over something. The father drove a little further and stole a glance in the mirror. He looked as if he were going be sick. I glanced back and saw the beaver’s tail wave feebly once, twice and then stop. Total silence in the car. I never heard any of us ever mention this incident.  We certainly did not try to collect its fur.)

(To be continued.)

The impression I get from hearing it discussed among my friends is that curling is not the official name for the sport. Instead, it is, I Could Do That. But I doubt that any of them could get low enough to be in the proper position to slide the rock down the sheet. And none of them understands the strategy.

“His friend was a chronic romantic who constantly made the mistake of falling in love with women before sleeping with them.” John Lanchester, Capital.

Is there a difference between an adviser and an advisor?

What does it mean that some people want secure borders but don’t care about secure elections?

As I neared the exits on the expressways. I saw the usual signs giving the names of the highways and the towns and cities I could find if I left the interstate. Another set of signs indicated “services” near the exits—motels and fast food restaurants mostly. Near many, but not all, of the exits, signs also listed “attractions.” These were a varied lot, including wineries, malls, parks, campgrounds, a miniature roadside village. They seemed aimed at creating an impulse decision by the driver and passengers to make a visit to the “attraction.” But then an attractions sign listed Hershey Medical Center. Would you put that on an attractions sign?

A postcard came with the restaurant check. The card was an old photograph of a bridge under construction. I asked the hostess what bridge it was. She did not know. I thought she should have.

I was disappointed to learn that “Mickey Rooney” was not Mickey Rooney’s name.

As he came into the theater lobby, he said, “Actually I didn’t think it was going to be this cold.” “That just shows,” his companion replied, “how poorly you think.”

“Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

When that time comes for me , don’t say he earned his angel wings or joined the angels or that he has been laid to eternal rest or he went to a better place (there is a place better than Brooklyn?) or he went to his eternal glory or even that he passed away. Just say he died.

She was in an Off-Broadway musical. I said that I might go to it if I could find discount tickets. Even though I had just met her, she got offended and said that she had to pay full price for her masters in music, so I should have to pay full price to hear her.

(Guest post by the spouse)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved miniature things. Well, we all love puppies and kittens and even human babies. But I loved miniature things, read dollhouses and the things that were inside them. When I was a child in the 1950’s, a dollhouse from Sears and Roebuck was a somewhat boring affair: a metal box with a slanting roof, open on one side to reveal four cubes representing four nondescript rooms (where was the bathroom?). Still, it was small, and if you could find them in Woolworth’s and your mom would let you splurge a little, tiny pieces of plastic furniture could be housed inside. I thought that was pretty satisfying until I was 9 or so. It was around that time that I became aware of the Colleen Moore Dollhouse at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. No mere house, this. It was a mansion of a million rooms (or so it seemed), each completely furnished down to the teeny rose in a teeny vase on a delicately carved mahogany table next to a velvet-covered settee carefully placed on a tiny Persian carpet. And it had electric lighting! Electrified chandeliers, electrified wall sconces. It was a revelation.

As I gawked at this magnificence, though, the pitiful contrast to my Sears and Roebuck box became far too apparent. Knowing that something so utterly amazing existed whose elegance and detail could never be duplicated (at least, not by me) quashed my interest in dollhouses for many years thereafter.

It was a bit later in life that I marveled at the historically accurate rendering of tiny rooms at the Chicago Art Institute. Conceived by Mrs. James Ward Thorne in the mid-twentieth century, the rooms were (“painstakingly” almost goes without saying) constructed on a scale of one inch to one foot, and there are 68 of them! It’s overwhelming to the likes of me, and similarly discouraging. This was a life’s work – and an expensive one. It would take a highly dedicated Mrs. Thorne’s full-time efforts and considerable fortune to even think of duplicating a single room. Sigh.

I most certainly should have given up this interest in miniatures. But no. At Gainesville (Florida) High School I chaired the decorations committee for the senior prom. They could not have picked a more inept leader. Being a complete dufus, I envisioned an entrance to the dance floor (the gym) that would replicate – in miniature — the Gainesville main street at the turn of the century. Low-rise buildings, gas lights, cobble-stone streets. It was a complete and utter disaster! Neither I nor anyone on my committee had a clue on how even to begin. I have mostly repressed the whole affair, but I think somebody’s mother bailed me out by providing crepe paper streamers and Kleenex roses – like any sensible prom decorating committee should have done.

But I never really gave up being enamored of small things. Even my scientific career focused on things microscopic. Nothing gave more satisfaction than to examine through a microscope cells stained to show the delicate intricacies of their inner workings.

And in the meantime, I started to collect miniature tea sets. Cheap enough and still satisfyingly small. I learned that there are small tea sets (suitable for tea time with a teddy bear), smaller tea sets (not suitable for anything, really), and teensy, tiny tea sets (designed to please people like me who have a miniature fetish and a limited budget). The smallest I have came from a gift shop at The Greenbrier. The tray upon which the tea pot, sugar, creamer and two cups in saucers sits is no more than three centimeters in diameter. I love it. All of my tiniest treasures are now displayed in a shadow box that is ill-lit. No one really notices it, but I do, and when I do, it surprises and pleases.

Not knowing much about the military nor coming from a military family, I was never as intrigued by toy soldiers, but a friend, James Hillestad, has a most extraordinary collection of toy soldiers at the Toy Soldier Museum in Cresco, PA. Here are 3,000 square feet of full-scale models with 70 authentic military uniforms. You can see the battle at Vicksburg, parade scenes of Scottish bagpipers, the military review that attended Queen Victoria on a visit to India, etc. etc. In short, hundreds of toy soldiers are on breath-taking display. Definitely worth a trip to the Poconos or go to http://www.the-toy-soldier.com.

Well, okay, so when I retired, I decided to give my full-time effort to building a doll house. I bought a reasonably sized, reasonably priced kit to produce a Victorian house with four rooms (one is a bathroom!) and a front porch. I put wall paper on its walls and carpets on its floors. The bathroom has “tiles.” The outside is painted dark green with white trim. It’s furnished now, complete with a teeny, tiny copy of Scientific American on the living room coffee table. There’s a chandelier in the dining room, but it’s not electrified, and it keeps falling down. There’s a tray of wine and fruit available to guests. I decorated the outside for Christmas with battery-powered fairy lights. I love it. And…I have gotten that Moore/Thorne impulse out of my system.

I think of this topic because I recently saw what must be one of the most amazing miniaturization projects ever! The Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, Florida, houses a 3,800 square foot model of a circus conceived and built by one Howard C. Tibbals. It comprises (in small part) The Big Top (with 7,000 folding chairs and five rings), the Midway complete with side shows, the multitude of train cars that carry the 500 hand-carved elephants, tigers, and horses. Horses! Hundreds of horses both for work and for performing. There are clowns putting on make-up, the cooking tent and mess tent with maybe 500 people inside, each with his own tiny plate of food, a patrons’ parking lot with old-timey model cars, a wardrobe tent with tiny sequined circus costumes pouring out of tiny circus trunks. They say there are more than 42,000 individual pieces, not including railroad ties and tent poles. A separate exhibit shows the parade pageantry of the Big Top with hundreds of elephants, acrobats, and costumed beauties. Go to You Tube and put in Howard Bros. Circus. It is miraculous.

So, you see, there are more people than you might think who are driven to a lifetime of miniaturization. Bless ‘em!

“He wasn’t a great writer, only a good one.”  Jerome Charyn, Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

“Long, narrow Manhattan Island sits in the bay, among other islands, outcroppings, flatlands, like a silhouette of a right whale navigating a rocky passage; on the area map, among blank-faced formations all like itself colored yellow for density of population, it lies like a smelt in a pan.” Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York.

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.” Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy.

“Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or like a lozenge or like a paramecium (what remains of its protruding ribs, its cilia) or like a gourd or like some sort of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere.” Phillip Lopate, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan.

“At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin.” Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees.

“When the first apartment house was built in New York City, it was as out of place on the streets as a visitor from another country or another century.” Elisabeth Hawes, New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930).

“In the beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass.” Jonathan Goldstein, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!

“For the first few days of the trip to Fort Sumter, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was in excellent spirits.” Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.

Michelle Bachman announced a month or so ago that she had asked God if she should run for a Minnesota Senate seat. Although she stated that God had previously told her to run for other offices, this time He did not bother to answer her question at all, and she is not running for what had been Al Franken’s seat. Does this make you believe more or less in God?

Why are some government officials a “Secretary”? You know, Secretary of State, Defense Secretary, and so on. Are comparable non-governmental officials ever “secretaries”?

“If one attitude can be said to characterize America’s regard for immigration over the past two hundred years, it is the belief that while immigration was unquestionably a wise and prescient thing in the case of one’s parents or grandparents, it really ought to stop now.” Bill Bryson, Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States.

I have read biographies of J. Edgar Hoover. I have read histories of the FBI. I have read newspaper stories and magazine articles about that law enforcement agency. As a lawyer, teacher, scholar, administrator, and landlord, I have had dealings with FBI agents—excuse me—FBI special agents. Even so, recently, I have come to have a new regard for  this federal agency. In all my study and interactions, they were circumspect beyond belief in hiding the fact that the FBI was a leader in a vast, left-wing conspiracy.

The recent Grammy telecast had an overhead camera shot of dancers on the floor making kaleidoscope patterns. This was reminiscent of the June Taylor Dancers. I wondered if any of the Grammy dancers, or even the choreographer, had any idea who the June Taylor Dancers were.

Why is it that the national debt only matters when Democrats are in charge of the government?

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.” George Orwell, Animal Farm.

I am sure that there are good reasons for them, but life was better for me before supermarkets started putting those little stickers on apples and pears.

I was on the sidewalk and could see her through the store’s window. She was behind the counter. She was very attractive. I went in. I admired her yogurts. They were not semi-skim. They were full fat.